Lamia

In Greek mythology, Lamia was a Queen of Libya who became a child-murdering daemon. In later writings she is pluralized into many lamiae (Greek lamiai). Similar in type to other female monsters from Greco-Roman myth, such as the empuses and the mormolyces, she is distinguished from them by her description as half-woman and half-serpent.

Lamia was the daughter of Poseidon and Lybie, a personification of the country of Libya and a queen of Libya herself, whom Zeus loved. Hera discovered the affair and stole away Lamia's children, whereupon Lamia in her grief became a monster and began murdering children. Zeus granted her the power of prophecy as an attempt at appeasement, as well as the related ability to temporarily remove her eyes. Either Hera turned her into a monster, she was transformed by grief over the murder of all her children (except Scylla), or she was already one of Hecate's brood. Plutarch heard that Lamia had the gift to be able to take her eyes out and then put them back in. A later elaboration on this archaic mytheme is that this gift was given by Zeus, and further, that Lamia was cursed with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children.